The Cortical Mechanisms Underlying Ocular Dominance Plasticity in Adults are Not Orientationally Selective

Abstract

Recently, it has been shown that short-term monocular deprivation in adult humans can temporally shift the ocular dominance in favor of the deprived eye. It is not clear whether this form of ocular dominance plasticity can be explained by cortical contrast adaptation, which is known to be orientationally selective. Here we show that if only one eye is deprived of a limited band of orientations for a short period of 2.5 h, the deprived eye's contribution to binocular function at all orientations rather than just those corresponding to the previously deprived orientations is strengthened. This isotropic enhancement is quite different from the orientational enhancement previously reported and suggests a separate neuroplastic mechanism specific to binocular function.

Keywords: adaptation; contrast-gain; ocular dominance plasticity; orientationally selective; short-term monocular deprivation.